Believers and Their Stupid Beliefs

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We should all be people of action, joining in common endeavors to stave off the human-caused annihilation of nature, us, the orangutans, the whales, the future, the future for your children and grandchildren, but instead, this wordpressian meeting ground is proving to be a habitual playground for some seriously idiotic, stooopid believer nobodies – yeah, you know who you are.

Yet even the semi-upright types here, ones with a working critical cognitive apparatus, have no basic idea of what we are supposed to be doing with our great and vaunted superior intellects, honed by decades of impassioned and pleasureful reading. That goes doubly true for Fun Social Nihilism. At this here social media thing, the only venue that Fun Social Nihilism permits its world-wide global staff to enter, the results have been glorious, nihilistic failure! There is a zero-sumzone here.

In a word, we absolutely suck. O my god, are we bad at this. There hasn’t been the slightest change in the orbit of this browning planet because of FSN, and for obvious reasons. No one wants to entertain doom, however vividly relayed. The “stats” for FSN are thrillingly awful, pathetic, beyond exasperation into some other realm – there is a major, fatal inability to satisfy the social interests of other people here at FSN.

And yet zero sum zone that is precisely within the business plan and guiding ethos of FSN. We are all heading off, each in our way, to ‘Vion (shortened Oblivion, and rhymes with Zion), and it is only the most human who can go the way that their conscience and creative antipathies dictate, and not the one that entrances the murmurings of the deluded crowd. When some human construction is this bad, this under-performing, this deeply unrewarding and ignorable, there is some beautiful, romantic cosmic happiness afoot.

My reading tends on the darker side lately learning about why societies believe as they do and why they can maintain those beliefs while committing acts of unspeakable violence.

Right now I’m reading Volker Ulrich’s “Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939”, and then Richard Carrier’s “On the Historicity of Jesus” and Michael Perelman’s “The Invention of Capitalism”. Also have Faust’s Metropolis on the way.

I guess that’s entirely along the lines of books on my own shelf. Reading: Dark side Living: a much less dark side.

Free Inquiry magazine, in the last two issues had a great exchange on the historicity of some ben Yahweh character. Your take will no doubt better than mine – I have no real background in the controversy.
Streeck’s book on capitalism references a book culled from six different thinker on whether capitalism will survive. A book on Hitler that stayed with me was Guido Preparata’s “Conjuring Hitler.”
This is not to engage in reading one-upsmanship – it just sounds like similar wavelengths.
Great, necessary subjects – happy reading and commenting.